T. De Witt Talmage eBook

It was the most wonderful summer of evangelical work
I was ever privileged to enjoy. There must have
been much praying for me and my welfare, or no mortal
could have got through with the work. In every
city I went to, messages were passed into my ears for
families in America. The collection taken for
the benefit of the Y.M.C.A. at Leeds was about $6,000.
During this visit I preached in Scenery Chapel, London,
in the pulpit where such consecrated souls as Rowland
Hill and Newman Hall and James Sherman had preached.
I visited the “Red Horse Hotel,” of Stratford-on-Avon,
where the chair and table used by Washington Irving
were as interesting to me as anything in Shakespeare’s
cottage. The church where the poet is buried is
over seven hundred years old.

The most interesting place around London to me is
in Chelsea, where, on a narrow street, I entered the
house of Thomas Carlyle. This great author was
away from London at the time. Entering a narrow
hall, on the left is the literary workshop, where
some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world’s
literature have been forged. In the room, which
has two front windows shaded from the prying street
by two little red calico curtains, is a lounge that
looks as though it had been made by an author unaccustomed
to saw or hammer. On the wall were a few woodcuts
in plain frames or pinned on the wall. Here was
a photograph of Carlyle, taken one day, as a member
of his family told me, when he had a violent toothache
and could attend to nothing else, and yet posterity
regards it as a favourite picture. There are
only three copies of this photograph in existence.
One was given to Carlyle, the other was kept by the
photographer, and the third belongs to me. In
long rough shelves was the library of the renowned
thinker. The books were well worn with reading.
Many of them were books I never heard of. American
literature was almost ignored; they were chiefly books
written by Germans. There was an absence of theological
books, excepting those of Thomas Chalmers, whose genius
he worshipped. The carpets were old and worn and
faded. He wished them to be so, as a perpetual
protest against the world’s sham. It did
not appeal to me as a place of inspiration for a writer.

I returned to America impressed with the over-crowding
of the British Isles, and the unsettled regions of
our own country.

“Tell the United States we want to send her
five million population this year, and five million
population next year,” said a prominent Englishman
to me. I urged a mutual arrangement between the
two governments, to people the West with these populations.
Great Britain was the workshop of the world; we needed
workers. The trouble in the United States at
this time was that when there was one garment needed
there were three people anxious to manufacture it,
and five people anxious to sell it. We needed
to evoke more harvests and fruits to feed the populations
of the world, and more flax and wool for the clothing.
The cities in England are so close together that there
is a cloud from smokestacks the length and width of
the island. The Canon of York Minster showed
me how the stone of that great cathedral was crumbling
under the chemical corrosion of the atmosphere, wafted
from neighbouring factories.